Lawrence Kosick, one of the co-founders and President of GetSetUp, spoke with Amsterdam News about his company, technology needs for older adults during COVID-19, and the future of online education. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
AmNews: Could you tell us about GetSetUp?
Kosick: GetSetUp is a virtual learning platform for older adults, and we started the business almost 5 years ago, a little bit prior to the pandemic. I think we thought it was both a problem and an opportunity back then because both my co-founder and I, had older friends, family, and loved ones. . . we just thought there needs to be a safe, secure place for every other demographic to go and learn new things, socialize, and connect with others. Why was there nothing specific for older adults? We thought, well, why don’t we create that place. Now, as the name GetSetUp would suggest, we actually started thinking we’d solve the digital literacy problem. Help everybody with basic tech get set up on whatever smart device they had at home, to get online, and get into your first Zoom class. The premise was, if we could help you with your iPad, your tablet, Android, whatever device you had or even if it was an old computer that needed the operating system or the browser updated, we would help you do that and if you could do that then you could open up a whole new universe of anything and everything that you could learn. If you think about the time right before the pandemic, we had folks who liked to learn things, but when the pandemic hit, they needed to learn how to access almost every service virtually because they were now stuck at home. So we scrambled from sort of helping somebody with basic tech to ‘oh goodness’ we need to teach folks how to use Telehealth, how to do online banking, how to order [food] and have it delivered, how to have their medication delivered, how to cook at home, exercise at home.
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AmNews: You have a large number of users. How did you get to that number?
Kosick: When we started, we thought whatever we build, let’s build something that’s easy for older adults to use. How do we remove as much friction as we can to help somebody learn to use a device? That was the original premise. That way, we got good at helping older adults, and it was in part because of the pandemic. Our initial partners were area agencies for the aging; Departments of the Aging, Health and Human Services. In many cases, we were given large lists and we would reach out, call folks, and help them with whatever device they had, get them into a class, give them a tour of GetSetUp, find out what they were interested in, and help them book their classes. We got really good at activation, and we tried to never lose that sort of muscle memory because we find that in the aging space, there are so many wonderful products and services and programs, but many of them go undiscovered and unused.
We wanted to build something that got used, so whatever we did we wanted to make sure that it was easy to use and people could access it. Then we started partnering with states like New York. New York was one of our earliest and remains to date, one of our biggest partners. We wanted to make it easier for older New Yorkers to access and get whatever it is they needed. And part of that was to get somebody onto the platform taking classes. There are only so many basic tech classes one can take, but then if you want to retain and engage them over a longer period of time and get them to take a lot of classes, and tell their friends, you’ve got to offer other interesting classes and content.
AmNews: Is this free for people?
Kosick: For the most part, yes, it is free. And I’ll tell you why we got there: We needed to find organizations who cared about the health and wellness of older adults and had some sort of reason to keep them healthy and independent longer. That’s why we partnered with Departments of the Aging, Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs, libraries, and healthcare companies because they do have the financial incentive to help older adults stay at home healthy longer.
AmNews: Where do you get your teachers from?
Kosick: We struggled with that initially. We contacted the Retired Teachers Association and we said ‘Do you have a bunch of people that would like to do a little part-time work, and if so send us their resumes.’ Many of them had taught in a classroom… we realized once older adults had taken classes… many of them would raise their hand and say I’m a retired doctor, teacher, lawyer, nurse, yoga instructor, and can I teach on your platform and in many cases, they could. They were wonderful teachers. We put them through training, reskilling, and upskilling. Most of them had the core credentials in that subject matter; they just needed to know how to teach online.
AmNews: Is there anything else you’d like the Amsterdam News Readers to know?
Kosick: Our platform is open to absolutely everybody. In many cases, we’ve worked with local agencies . . .there are a lot of wonderful resources out there for older adults; people just don’t know about [them]. Any way we can help access those [resources] we want to do that.
Visit www.getsetup.com to learn more.